Tag: opens

NEW YORK CITY — New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio celebrated the opening of the National Tennis Center in Queens as a hospital Friday and said the facility may be used to quarantine recovering patients to prevent a resurgence of the coronavirus once the city is past the acute crisis phase of the pandemic.

“You need a lot of capacity to quarantine people and isolate people to make that work,” de Blasio said. “Facilities like these, if they’re not needed for medical, will be turned into quarantine and isolation facilities to help people get through their own experience with the disease while making sure we don’t infect the other members of their family or other people in their life.”

For now, the home of the U.S. Open has been converted into a 470-bed hospital intended to relieve the burden from the overtaxed Elmhurst Hospital.